We've been building React Native apps since the early days — before Expo was stable, before Hermes, before the new architecture. We've watched it mature from a 'good enough' cross-platform option into something genuinely impressive for the right use cases. We've also watched it get used in the wrong contexts and produce apps that teams eventually had to rewrite.
Here's an honest assessment of where things stand in 2025.
What's genuinely good about React Native now
The new architecture (Fabric + JSI) has addressed most of the performance complaints from 2019–2022. If you're starting a new project today with Expo SDK 51+, you're getting near-native performance for most UI interactions, proper concurrent rendering, and a significantly improved bridge story.
Expo's managed workflow has matured to the point where it covers ~90% of what startups need without ever leaving JavaScript. EAS Build handles CI/CD well. OTA updates work reliably. The developer experience is genuinely good.
For teams coming from a web background, React Native lets you ship iOS and Android with one codebase and one team. That's a real cost advantage — and in the startup world, cost advantage equals survival advantage.
Where React Native still struggles
Anything that requires deep platform integration. Bluetooth LE, complex audio routing, background processing with tight hardware constraints, ARKit/ARCore with custom rendering — these all work in React Native, but each one requires native module work that erodes the 'write once, ship twice' promise.
Apps with very high animation fidelity requirements. Yes, React Native Reanimated v3 is impressive. But if your app's core experience is built on 60fps+ complex animations with physics and gesture interactions across the full screen, Flutter or native will give you a smoother path.
Large codebases with complex navigation patterns. React Navigation is excellent, but deeply nested navigation trees with complex state management can become architecturally challenging at scale. This isn't unique to React Native — it's a consequence of the JS paradigm applied to mobile.
The Flutter question
Flutter has earned its reputation for smooth performance and consistent cross-platform rendering. Its 'compile to native code, draw everything yourself' approach eliminates an entire class of platform-inconsistency bugs.
But Flutter requires Dart, and Dart is a language most web teams don't know. For a team that can hire JavaScript engineers, React Native has a significantly larger talent pool. For greenfield projects with a dedicated mobile team that's open to Dart, Flutter is a serious contender.
How we choose
Our default in 2025 is React Native with Expo for new projects where: the team is JavaScript-fluent, the app doesn't require deep hardware integrations, and the release timeline is under 12 months.
We choose native (Swift/Kotlin) when: the app requires complex hardware access, the performance requirements are extreme, or the client already has native engineers.
We choose Flutter when: the client needs consistent pixel-perfect rendering across platforms and is open to a dedicated Flutter team.
We've never recommended Ionic or Capacitor for a client product in the last three years. For web-heavy apps with light mobile requirements, we'd rather build a good PWA.
The honest answer
React Native in 2025 is a mature, capable platform that's the right choice for the majority of startup mobile apps. It's not the right choice for everything — but neither is any other framework. The question is always: what does this specific product need, for this specific team, with this specific timeline and budget?
That question doesn't have a universal answer. Anyone who tells you it does is selling something.